Plates

Tadeusz Mysłowski's Kompozycja nowojorksa (1991) is a set of transfer-printed stoneware plates, made in limited edition by a porcelain factory in Pruszków. Mysłowski flew to New York in 1970, and the city made a lasting impression on him. Already on the plane approaching the runway, he was fascinated by the view of space evenly divided by sequences of streets and avenues into regular rectangles, its purity and shapes. As a result, New York became more than just a living place for the artist – it kept inspiring him to reflect on the constant evolution of geometric forms - from Euclidean straight lines to the organic nature of complex, curvilinear space. This resulted in ideas for series of works, including Avenue of Americas, New York Faces, Toward Organic Geometry and New York Composites. Mysłowski used photographic techniques to divide the frames into parts of varying size, some of them enlarged, bringing out visual aspects that had previously been elusive. He highlighted the clash of vertical and horizontal lines, the ambiguous relationship between the background and the figure, between the line and the spot. He used simple symbols – points, lines, crosses, squares, thus showing the relation between geometry and metaphysics, and the universal character of the laws of nature. A square and an isosceles cross are the main motives of the artist's works, both graphic and painting, as well as his spatial compositions.In his work, Tadeusz Mysłowski refers to the great classics of geometric abstraction and constructivists, such as Kazimierz Malewicz, Piet Mondrian, Katarzyna Kobro, Władysław Strzemiński and Henryk Berlewi, who have been an extremely important source of inspiration for him almost from the beginning of his creative career. The art critic Szymon Bojko described Mysłowski as a creative follower of the best European tradition of constructivism and suprematism.

Marlena Chybowska-Butler